The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the human.

In the year 2088, the general editor of selected Papers of the Joyce Wars has her hands full. she finds the documents (paper, electronic, and plasmic) surviving from 1988 incomplete, contradictory, error-prone, stylistically archaic and a touch comic.

Who shall say, then, that in that immensely remote and long-protracted era -- the Eocene period -- in which the gigantic elephantoids first made their appearance, there did not exist somewhere, in some one of nature's more cunning and prolific recesses, the exact plasmic conditions necessary for the appearance of the mastodon?